Author notes: I wasn't sure who was older between Naruto and Gaara, but for the sake of my story, Naruto is born before Gaara.
I found a beta reader, Feiris, so I updated chapter 1 to correct mistakes I made.
Temari didn't have any fight left with her. Her brothers are gone now. Shikamaru was dead, she didn't want to get up and help the others. Everyone that mattered to her are gone, she didn't see the point in living a life anymore. She regretted not confessing to her friend how she felt, denying her feelings to anyone teasing her about loving the Nara boy.
She stayed laying on top of Shikamaru's body for what seemed like an eternity. She didn't remember what happened next in the war, but she fell asleep at some point, dreams filled with nightmares. She relived her friends being killed. Gaara's body on the ground. Her home being destructed.
She opened her eyes screaming of the horror of Shikamaru being killed again. She tried catching her breath, body completely shaking, and noticed it was very dark. She was laying down, on something that felt comfortable. Either she was laying on sand, or in an infirmary bed? She sat up, trying to get a bigger picture. Her chest didn't hurt in the motion. Actually, nothing physically hurt, and that felt very abnormal.
She looked around, her eyes slowly adjusting to the night. She was sitting on a bed. There was a window next to it, rounded, like the ones at home. She frowned. She was started to recognize the place. Her bedroom in Suna. Wind was blowing sand outside the window. Temari was shaken. Whoever put her into a genjutsu had to be killed.
Before she could try to dismiss the genjutsu, the door opened. Temari almost forgot to breathe. Uncle Yashamaru.
"Temari, is everything ok?" the man asked. "I heard you screaming?"
Temari concentrated to stop shaking, trying to hide from the man. I'm not ok. Everyone is supposed to be dead. You're supposed to be dead for years.
"I'm… I'm ok."
"Bad dreams?"
Temari decided it wasn't really a lie if she nodded. The last thing she remembered was horrifying and she had woken up right after. She could consider it as a bad dream, in the eyes of Yashamaru. To her, it still felt very real.
Her awful life was so real that she didn't realize that she felt some humidity in her underwear. You've got to be kidding me, Temari she thought for herself you can not have wet your bed, what the actual fuck?
Squirming and hoping her uncle wouldn't notice, she laid down back into her bed. She wanted him to leave. She wanted to change her clothes in peace, and figure everything out by herself. But the man approached even closer, humming that lullaby her mother used to sing before Gaara's birth killed her. The lullaby she never heard after and almost had forgotten. Tears filled her eyes.
"Shh, Temari, it's ok. It was just a dream. It's all going to be ok. Do you want me to lie next to you until you fall asleep?"
Temari took the question like a slap in the face. How old did he think she was? She was not a baby, for god's damn sake!
And then, she started to feel herself panicking. She had given her chakra signature on a seal to go back in time. That seal was supposed to be last resort, and bring her to when she was eight. Could it be it? It'd explain how Yashamaru was right there.
Yashamaru kissed her good night, but then something caught his attention.
"Temari, I think you had a little accident?"
Fuck. He knew. How did he notice? Temari's cheeks filled with heat. She wanted to deny it, but he was already taking the covers off her body, and stood up to get her pajamas.
"'ll take care of this myself," she said. She then admitted, "I didn't want to tell you."
"Oh, dear Temari! You don't have to be ashamed, these things happen! No one will be frustrated, I promise. We'll just change you and the bedsheets and then you can go back to sleep. I won't even tell your parents if you want."
She caught the man winking. He probably wanted to make her feel better, but what eight-year-old wet the bed and it's supposed to be normal?
He took her into his arms, and Temari realized she felt way smaller in her arms than what she expected. How old was she really?
"I shouldn't have peed in the bed, I don't know what happened!"
"I'm thinking you were just very scared from your bad dream. Besides, it's ok to still have accidents, you haven't been out of diapers for very long. Why are you so hard on yourself?"
Temari felt her body tensing. Diapers? No, no, no… she was a… toddler? She shouldn't have trusted the Hokage to make a good working seal…
Yashamaru helped her change, because apparently, she was so young that she struggled with recognizing the front and back of underwear and getting the right foot into the right pajama leg, and would have put her top backwards.
He sang her to sleep, and she pretended to be asleep, so her uncle would leave the bedroom as soon as possible. She needed to think. She was very young. She needed to figure out the timeline here. Was Gaara born yet? She wasn't so sure, Temari didn't have many memories from her toddler years, only vague memories of her mother, and when her father announced her mother's passing. She couldn't recall how old she was when she stopped wearing diapers at night. She wanted to explore the house to help her, but she was scared of being caught. Her body was probably way less agile and more prone to making sounds when she walked. Grace and discretion probably came years further down the line. From training, and trying to sneak around Gaara. But now she can help him.
A voice woke her up. Temari's eyes didn't want to open. She forced herself to open at least one. The sun was entering through the window. Temari blinked, noticing the person next to her.
The similarity with Yashamaru was obvious, but the woman's traits didn't lie.
"Mother?" Temari whispered. If waking up in the body of a child was terrifying, she really wanted it not to be just a bad dream now. Her mother was still alive. Temari knew what her goal was, starting now: prevent her death. She didn't want to live through this again. She couldn't lose her mother twice.
"Hey, your uncle told me you had a bad dream last night, want to talk about it?"
Temari shook her head. She couldn't tell her mother about all the horrifying things that happened in the future. She couldn't tell anyone who she really was, from what time. She had to pretend to be a little girl. Even if she had long forgotten what it was to be so small.
The emotion of seeing that face was overwhelming, and Temari surprised herself by crying. She didn't want to cry. Her father didn't raise her this way. She wiped the tear as soon as it fell off her cheek.
"Hey, it's ok, Temari. Sometimes I have bad dreams, too. But the most important thing is that it's just dreams. It's not real."
Temari wished it was just a bad dream, that parts of her memories had been ripped off. Looking for comfort, she snuggled her face against her mother's shoulder. Her neck smelled of the perfume she used to wear. Adult Temari had long forgotten it, but suddenly she remembered the familiar odor.
Karura was wearing a t-shirt and a pajama bottom. She had only just woken up too. The top was quite well fitted on the woman, which revealed a very small bump. It was barely noticeable. With the usual clothes her mother wore, no one in the village would suspect she was pregnant. Gaara already existed in this timeline. Temari didn't have much plan about her future with what she knew other than preventing her father to turn Gaara into a psychopath, but now that the One-tail beast was not yet into her brother, maybe she could convince him not to seal it into Gaara? The problem was that her mother had tried. If Karura and Yashamaru failed, how would Temari, a three-year-old little girl succeed?
Temari sat next to Kankuro, taking the spot at the table she thought she usually sat at. Kankuro was even smaller than what she remembered. It felt weird to have her brother be so small, because as adults, he was taller than her.
"You had bad dreams too?" Kankuro said with a high-pitched voice Temari had long forgotten.
"Yeah. It's ok, though. There's just dreams," Temari lied. She had always been protective of her brothers, today was not going to change that.
"Woah," Karura said. "You've become quite the talker, Kankuro!"
Temari noticed the tension suddenly in her brother's shoulder, and his eyes widened, as if he realized something bad or embarrassing. He too was from the future… and wasn't really good at acting yet. Temari had to find a way of telling Kankuro she had her memories as well. He was too young to act on whatever plans they could think of to have both Gaara and Karura alive and well, but maybe he had ideas on how to achieve it.